After widespread adoption of telephones for residential use, marketers came to realize the advantages of using phones to contact potential customers as opposed to traditional methods of selling, i.e., door-to-door selling, direct mail advertising, etc., thereby initiating the age of telemarketing. Telemarketing is a form of direct marketing where a salesperson uses the telephone to call prospective customers in an attempt to sell products or services. Prospective customers are identified and qualified by various means, including past purchase histories, previous requests for information, credit limit, sweepstakes or competition entry forms or application forms. Names of prospective customers may also be purchased from another company's customer database, or obtained from a telephone directory or some other public list or forum. The qualification process is intended to find those prospective customers most likely to purchase the product or service being sold or advertised.
Call centers were established to engage in telemarketing activities. Call centers include necessary equipment and personnel to make telemarketing calls. Call centers may also serve as a customer service center to receive calls from existing or potential customers. For example, a call center could be used to receive telephone calls regarding purchase of a product or service from potential customers who are responding to a television, radio, newspaper/magazine and/or internet advertising campaign. A call center could also be used for customer service purposes to respond to product use and warranty questions, complaints, billing inquiries for existing customers, etc.
As the number of call centers grew, so did the need to be able to increase calling efficiency such that more calls could be placed per hour by a call center employee, thereby, increasing the number potential customers called in a shift. In effort to increase calling efficiency, a system referred to as a predictive dialer was developed. The predictive dialer is primarily used by large call centers having high volume telemarketing operations that contract their services to other companies. A predictive dialer system includes a server computer that is coupled to a large number (for example, 50-300) of workstation computers having two or three phone lines attached to each computer. The predictive dialer software attempts to predict how many calls need to be made for a phone to be answered and to predict when a telemarketer/operator on one of its workstations will be available to make a pick up an answered call. The prediction is accomplished by implementing a formula referred to as a “pacing algorithm.” The server computer controlling the system constantly monitors the activities of the workstations and updates the calling “pace rate.”
Because the predictive dialer operates by employing a statistical analysis, the larger the number of workstation computers, the better the predictive dialer works. In other words, with more workstation computers on the predictive dialer system, the shorter the pause between making a connection with called number (someone at the called number answering the phone) and a response by a telemarketer/operator to the picked up call. If the pause between the phone being answered and an operator responding to the answered phone is too long, either the person answering the phone will hang up after saying “hello” two or three times or the predictive dialer system, after a time out period, will hang up on the person answering the phone since no operator is available to pick up the answered call. Either situation is undesirable because a potential sale is missed and the person receiving the call is unnecessarily interrupted and irritated.
The latter situation, where a potential customer answering the phone is hung up on by the predictive dialer system is referred to as a “dropped call.” Government regulations mandate that the number of dropped calls be a very small percent of calls answered. Thus, minimizing dropped calls is very important. However, as the number of workstations used in connection with predictive dialer system (for example, 10 or fewer), the average pause between phone answer by a potential customer and the response by a telemarketer/operator increases thereby increasing the number of dropped calls. Because of this dropped call problem associated with the predictive dialer, the predictive function can be disengaged. By disengaging the predictive function, the server does not start dialing the next phone number until one of its connected workstations disconnects, i.e., an operator is available. This defeats the purpose of the predictive dialer and reduces the number of contacts per hour on smaller telemarketing systems.
Therefore, there is a need for a cost-effective call center telecommunications system suitable for relatively low volume call centers utilizing low cost personal computers and off-the-shelf peripheral equipment. What is also needed is a telecommunications system for call centers that provides for seamless transition between telemarketing activities (outbound dialing of calls to potential customers) and customer service activities (receiving inbound calls from customers or potential customers). What is also needed is a telecommunications system for call centers that is upwardly or downwardly scalable, that is, the number of call center workstations or call stations can be increased as needed to accommodate increasing volumes of inbound or outbound calls without the need for expensive restructuring of the telecommunications system.